Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy Read Online Free PDF

in front of a window, turns fully, one
hand still on the long handle of his roller bag, and the camera turns with him,
so we can see something of his reflection in the spotless picture window,
nothing to deter our sense of the fundamental monochrome atmosphere that
follows this man like the lens itself, passing through a halftone world into
which color, now, is starting to creep. Flashes now behind
him of a red car, a green skirt, a blue policeman pausing to fill out a ticket,
his face a depthless shadow under the brim of his cap. Lamb studies an
array of jewelry, nothing particularly expensive, without moving much, his face
as invisible as the policeman’s under the brim of his hat, but we can make out
the outlines of a dark tie against a light shirt behind further layers of
darkness: a suit coat, an overcoat, too heavy for the weather. There are
watches, bracelets, brooches, necklaces, earrings, pins, ankle bracelets,
chokers, armbands, wristbands, breastplates, or so it seems to the tourist and
so it must seem to us, marveling now at the neatness of the trick, for we seem
to be standing directly behind him and yet there’s no camera or cameraman in
the reflection, just the streaks of light that resolve themselves into cars or
pedestrians and the twin pillars of darkness, the man staring unresolvedly at
the many watches (no one of which shows the same time) and the policeman, head
bent over his ticket book, scratching away.
    Terrain of sounds. A long scraping noise. Indistinct voices. Foreigners. Small engines, tires on macadam, whine and
wheeze of a bad fan belt, receding. A motorbike’s
burr, dopplering toward us, getting louder and more aggressive, then its
reflection whizzing past in the window, then dopplering away. In this film our man is closely miked: we hear his slightly
heavy breathing, the soft movements of his clothing, his footsteps, when he
lights a cigarette we hear the heavy snap of the lighter and the audible
combustion of the first strands of tobacco, hear him inhale, hear the smoke
pouring down his windpipe, scratching up against precancerous polyps, hear him
cough shortly, a bark, hear his blood and heart agitated by the nicotine,
starting to beat louder and more quickly, hear his pupils dilate, snapping
wider with an audible click, hear the dripping sound as sweat glands above his
hairline gather moisture and salt to form beads of sweat to be absorbed by his
hatband, a kind of reverse sponge-squeezing sound as that no doubt already
stained ribbon of cloth takes on a further burden of the very essence of his
tourist’s anxiety, if he feels anxiety. We have, we hear, so much and no more.
Lamb is almost a palindrome, almost a blade, petit mal, blam. He carries us
toward what comes next.
    She
sits on her sofa staring into a compact, fixing her make-up. It’s discreet,
made visible only by her application of it, or by her repair, for there’s a
little black streak of mascara under her left eye that even now she wipes away
with a bit of cotton. She studies herself in the little mirror and sighs, not
quite audibly, then bends again to her tools. As she reapplies her mascara we
are struck by the absoluteness of her concentration, of her utter presence to
herself in the mirror as simply a face, a severe beautiful face with lines at
the brow and at the corners of her eyes, and slightly sharper edges around the
cheekbones, the curve of the mouth. She gives herself the kind of scrutiny our films
don’t give to women her age, older than thirty, older than forty or fifty, an
American unperson’s face still lovely in its mobility, though just now she’s
holding it steady, as steady as any starlet or woman holds her muscles when not
being looked at; though a woman is never not looked at, so if she smiles or
frowns because of that she does so invisibly, under the skin so to speak. She
bears our looking, she wears our desire, masculine and feminine, men and women
desire her, that still firm and erect body, though